Cloudification of the internet of things

The focus of this special issue is on the Internet of Things (IoT) with particular emphasis on the use of the Cloud as a central component of the IoTarchitecture and a key infrastructural support for IoT applications. With its virtualized infrastructure and software-defined networking substrate, the Cloud is in a good position to provide a flexible and scalable hosting environment for the plethora of emerging IoT applications in health, transportation, smart cities, and many other application areas. The shared infrastructure as service-oriented architecture of the Cloud can be indeed leveraged in support of IoT-generated data and control flows, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication, Big-data analytics, IoT management systems, security solutions, Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and SDN-based data forwarding to name a few. This special issue addresses a wide spectrum of research issues pertaining to the use of Cloud infrastructures in support of IoT systems from the sensors and machines to the end users and applications hosted in the Cloud. It comprises selected papers that provide an overview of and in-depth research, development, and deployment efforts on the Cloudification of IoT, specifically IoT infrastructure, IoT gateways, and IoT cloud environments. Hereafter, a summary of each paper accepted in this special issue is described.